Customer call centers, or simply, “call centers,” are often the first point of contact for customers seeking direct assistance from manufacturers and service vendors. Call centers provide customer support and problem resolution and are reachable by telephone, including data network-based telephone services, such as Voice-Over-Internet (VoIP), or via Web applications that allow customers to make calls, as well as through other communication channels. To be able to assist the customers, the call centers must often verify the identity of these customers. Such verification is necessary to both protect sensitive information of the customers, such as the customer's account balances or medical information, and to prevent unauthorized actions with regards to the customer accounts, such as withdrawal of money from the accounts.
Multiple ways to conduct an identity verification during a call exist, but these existing verification techniques are often inadequate or take too much time to perform. For example, callers are often asked to answer one or more questions, such as to provide their birthday or their mother's maiden name, to verify their identity. However, the requested information may often be found online or in other public sources, and the verification procedure can be successfully completed by a person other than the customer. Furthermore, asking the questions and processing the answers can require significant time, which prolongs the length of the calls and decreases customer satisfaction.
Alternatively, the verification may be conducted by analyzing the caller's voice. Such verification procedures involve a customer whose identity is verified undergoing an enrollment during which a sample of the customer's voice is obtained and analyzed. Subsequently, during an identity verification procedure, a caller is asked to speak a phrase and the caller's voice is compared to the prerecorded voice sample for a customer that the caller claims to be. Several issues can be encountered during such identity verification procedure. First, to be of value, the verification must be completed in a shorter time than by asking the caller questions. If the caller's voice does not perfectly match the enrollment voice sample for reasons such as insufficient sample length, the verification may take longer than necessary. Such issues can be further exacerbated when the voice sample was recorded under different circumstances, such as via a different communication channel, than the speech spoken by the caller. Further, where the verification procedure does not require the caller to speak a particular phrase, the verification procedure can be bypassed by an identity thief recording the voice of a customer and then playing the recording during the verification.
Accordingly, there is a need for a way to increase the speed and accuracy of verification of a caller's identity.